


something worth leaving behind

by memorysdaughter



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Friendship, Panic Attacks, Tea, Trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 08:34:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7162571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memorysdaughter/pseuds/memorysdaughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keyleth panics.  Pike tries to help.  (Grog, too.)</p>
<p>Post Ep. 56.</p>
            </blockquote>





	something worth leaving behind

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Something Worth Leaving Behind" by Lee Ann Womack.
> 
> Pike's quote ("I met a wise man...") is a Greek proverb.

She catches the briefest snatch of Percy’s conversation with Vax – “… _is all I’m saying, we’re wasting time and we can’t afford to…”_ – and the room tilts around her.

At first she thinks it’s the ale, it’s heady and strong the way ale is sometimes, going straight to her head and making her feel a little silly, a little dizzy, a little free from the body she’s felt weighing her down with the expectations of an entire race depending on her.  She puts her mug down on the table, maybe a little too hard, clatters into the din of the room and it seems as though all eyes in the room are on her.

_What are they saying?  Drunk Keyleth, foolish Keyleth, won’t let herself be loved, afraid of doing the right thing in the wrong way…_

She stands up, swaying, and her body doesn’t seem to be her own anymore.  It’s all still there, arms and legs and toes and fingers and head and ears, but she’s not controlling it.  She’s a golem to the demons in her mind, they’re driving her now, pressed into her temples like the circlet behind Fassbender’s destructive stomps and smashes.  She’s their puppet and she’s not doing a very good job.

_But how could you?  You’re not the right one for this task and you know it.  Foolish child, playing at adventuring, thinks she’s going to save the world.  Couldn’t even save the ones she’s supposed to be leading.  Calls herself a leader…_

It’s like a punch to her sternum, those words from the traitorous clockwork monkeys in her head.  She stumbles, hip catching another table, drinks clattering, more eyes on her.  The fist punching at her sternum turns into a grasping hand, a Bigby’s hand, twisting her lungs like wet washrags, wringing out the air as though it’s traitorous and stagnant.

The room gets smaller, the floor jerks out from under her, her heart pounds in her ears.

She isn’t sure how, but she stumbles out into the night.  Feet trip knees meet stone dirt grass elbows chin hands forehead –

Keyleth sinks into herself, sobbing.  Each breath is a stab, the world still tilting around her.  Everything seems very faraway, the lights from the tavern bobbing dimly, fireflies caught in another realm.  She chokes and struggles, hot tears streaming down her face, unable to get air into her lungs.

_You’re going to outlive them all_ , a voice hisses in her ears. _They won’t have to carry the weight of their decisions because they’re not going to be around long enough for it to matter.  Nothing you do is going to matter.  To them, to anyone.  Not even to you.  And you’ll be all alone at the end of it all, having learned nothing, having taken the very best of them all and doing absolutely nothing with it._

Panic and shame dig into her ribcage and she lets out a whimper.

_You don’t deserve them.  You never have._

“Keyleth?”

The fireflies, once so distant and faraway, like spots of oil on a clear pond, coalesce in front of her, glowing softly, limning a blurry figure.

“Keyleth, can you hear me?” The voice is gentle, calm, patient.

Keyleth knows that voice.  Knows that glow.  She hiccups and reaches out tentatively, afraid the fireflies will dart away from her shaking fingertips.  _Pike?_

“Good,” the voice says. “Good.  Just focus on me.”

A hand slips into hers, an anchor in the storm-tossed seas, a breath of air into her drowning lungs, and the world settles, maybe just a little.  Pike’s form solidifies a little, her hands and holy symbol glowing still, and Keyleth tries to focus.

Pike turns her head, but only slightly, her attention still on Keyleth. “Grog, get me some tea, please.”

There’s movement on the outside of Keyleth’s visual field and she realizes Grog’s been there the whole time, standing just behind Pike.  He nods and ducks back into the tavern without a word.

“Pike,” Keyleth manages to get out before her voice is swallowed up by sobs, before her arms and legs jerk inwards, her body still consumed in a spasm of panic.

“Shhh,” Pike murmurs. “It’s all right.  You don’t have to explain anything.”

Something in her words rings true and Keyleth drags in a deep breath for the first time in what seems like hours.  Her fingers clench around Pike’s and the world drops back into resolution, still muted and blunted but very much there.

Grog returns with a small tray clutched in his giant hands.  He looks ridiculous, an adult playing with children’s toys, but when he sets the tea things down next to Pike they suddenly seem too large.  He puts one massive hand on Pike’s shoulder; she looks up at him with adoration and gratitude in her eyes and somehow they manage to communicate without speaking a single word.  Grog turns and goes back into the tavern. 

Pike picks up the teapot and pours steaming, fragrant liquid into the two cups.  She passes one to Keyleth, making sure the druid’s fingers can hold the vessel before she releases it.  They sit and sip in silence.  Keyleth has no idea what the tea is, but it feels special.  And expensive.  And almost… holy.

At last she feels the iron grip on her throat relax and she finds words. “The room… was too small.”

Pike nods, looking at her seriously over the rim of her teacup.

“You probably… never have that problem,” Keyleth goes on, her voice rambling like ivy on a wall. “Every place is probably too big for you, so I don’t know if I can explain it, but I was too big and the room was too small and you probably think I’m crazy…”

She trails off, casting a hesitant glance towards Pike.

Pike lowers her cup. “I understand.”

“You do?”

Pike nods. “And Grog does, too.”

This stops Keyleth short. “But…”

“When I came back…” Pike bites her lip. “… I couldn’t stand to be in certain places because they reminded me… and, well, Grog got good at reading the signs.  I taught him how to help me… well, we learned together.”

She smiles wistfully.

“Pike,” Keyleth says softly. “Do you ever think about what we’re doing?”

Pike looks up at her, eyes wide. “All the time.”

“And you don’t think we’re doing the right thing in all the wrong ways?”

Pike doesn’t answer, and at first Keyleth worries she’s over-complicated the question or offended the cleric, but after a few minutes she sees Pike’s furrowed brow, the way the gnome’s finger traces aimless patterns in the spilled sugar on the tea tray, and she realizes the question’s more complicated than she thought.

Finally Pike shakes sugar free from her fingers. “Tell me about trees, Keyleth.”

This stops Keyleth in her tracks. “What?”

“Tell me about trees.”

“Trees.” Knowledge floods into Keyleth’s brain and sparks of power flow through her veins, her mouth opening without much further thought to give Pike a mere taste of the pure potential contained in a tree.  She stretches out into root systems, uncurls into fat buds becoming leaves turning gold and crimson, reaching high for the sun, bare and proud in the face of a winter’s snowfall.  She rushes in the wind, bows under the weight of a storm, lists by a riverside, trailing branches in the flow.  She glows gold and silver and green and brown, orange and ocher and yellow and flame, gnarled branches, knotholes for squirrels and birds, peeling bark, delicate flowering blossoms, hardy squat trunk.

She takes in a deep breath and falls silent, Pike looking at her in admiration.

“Why’d… why’d you ask about trees?” Keyleth asks, still a bit stunned.

“I met a wise man once who said that as people, we grow great when we learn to plant trees in whose shade we will never sit,” Pike answers.

Her response is so simple, so absolutely _druidic_ that it takes Keyleth’s breath away.

“I don’t think we try to do the right thing in the wrong ways,” Pike goes on. “I think we forget, every now and then, that what we’re trying to do has effects bigger than us.  For most of us, anyway.”

Her face becomes solemn. “We can’t save everyone, Keyleth.  Not even if we tried.  It would drive us insane and then drive us into the ground.  But if we all do what we _can_ do… that’s all that’s asked of us.”

She stands up, brushing sugar off her pants, and turns to go back into the tavern.

“Pike,” Keyleth says quietly, “do you think you’re a hero?”

“No,” Pike replies, “and I don’t think I ever will, no matter how many times someone says I am.  I’m just… I’m just Pike, from the Bramblewood.  Wilhand’s granddaughter, Grog’s best friend… and maybe… maybe if that’s who they’ll remember me as, rather than a hero, then I guess that’s what I’d want.”

She tilts her head, looking at Keyleth. “We only have so much time to get things right, Keyleth, even you.  In the end it’s what we leave behind – in the physical world, sure, but in people’s hearts and minds too.  And for what it’s worth…”

Pike smiles, and in that one tiny gesture Keyleth feels some disconnected part of herself snap back into place reassuringly. “… it’s been an honor planting trees with you, Keyleth, even if only one of us is going to sit beneath them.”

Once Pike’s gone Keyleth sits on the stone doorstep of the tavern, close enough to hear the music but far enough away from the room that couldn’t be trusted, and looks up at the stars.

“Plant trees, huh,” she murmurs, letting a delicate coil of druid-craft flow freely from her fingers. “I guess I can do that, at least.”

If Pike notices the small sapling newly planted outside the tavern’s door when Vox Machina leaves, she doesn’t say anything about it.

But she slips her hand into Keyleth’s, and the world doesn’t feel too big or too small or full of anger and darkness – for those moments, with the stars overhead and the ground sure beneath, it feels like the place Keyleth’s meant to belong.


End file.
